October 1999 LSAT Section 4 Question 19

In the decade from the mid–1980s to the mid–1990s, large corporations were rocked by mergers, reengineering, and down...

AndrewArabie on August 30, 2023

Answer choice E

I don't see how E contributes to an explanation of the paradox. The paradox is that while that decade was a period replete with possibilities for job loss, an employee's perception of their job security remained roughly constant. (E) Tells us that employee optimism was greater in the mid-90's than a decade before. First, optimism about your life is far too general to draw any predictions about their feelings regarding their job security. Second, granting that you can draw conclusions about job security from this, then those conclusions are just totally belied by the data in the stimulus. Third, it doesn't hint at a reason as to *why* this existed in the face of uncertainty.

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Emil-Kunkin on September 7, 2023

While I agree that E is pretty general, I don't think this is necessarily a problem. It tells us there was a general trend in a direction, and from this we can infer that one specific manifestation of this trend was that people felt better about their jobs.

To your second point, there are mismatches between reality and perception. People often feel that the economy is doing well when objective measure show it may not be doing so well, and visa versa. We actually see this on partisan lines in the US today. Republicans currently rate the economy worse than democrats do, and this was flipped when Trump was in office.

Finally, I don't think we really need to say why. All we need is the fact that people were more optimistic, not why they were.

I would sum up the way that E resolves the paradox by saying that overall sentiment improved across the board in all categories, and this improvement in sentiment included an improvement in views about job security. While this was counter to objective measures, it is likely that the magnitude of the positive wave on feeling about security was greater than the magnitude of the impact of objective measures on feelings about security.